They call themselves “Tintinologists”: those who delight in every detail of Hergé’s fictional young reporter, Tintin.
So ahead of Hollywood’s film version of the adventurous Belgian’s story, premiering in SA on Friday, the adaptation of the graphic novel series faces not so much criticism as fanatical uproar.
Press screenings of Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn have prompted one critic of the £82 million (R1.05 billion) movie – which uses cutting-edge “performance capture” technology – to compare it to “witnessing a rape”. Other earlier reviewers have panned it as an “airless pastiche” and “painful”: strong words for a story about a man with a quiff looking for buried treasure.
“People get freaked out if people change anything they came into contact with as a kid,” said a Tintin fan and author AL Kennedy, who is set to review the film for BBC2.
“From what I’ve seen in the previews the film does look a little blurry. Hergé always had such a clean line.” She said there was an element of annoyance towards Spielberg because he was “well-off and famous”.
Inspired by Hergé’s “palette” of characters, stories and designs, Spielberg teamed up with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson to create a predictably Hollywoodised Hergé, focusing on action instead of the Belgian’s trademark humour and employing the vocal talents of Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis and Daniel Craig.
Spielberg used the same special effects company responsible for James Cameron’s Avatar, utilising updated motion capture techniques. The director says he turned to such technology “because it most resembles the hand-to-paper art of Hergé”, but reviewers lament its stifling effect on the books’ personality.
“I do think it lacks a bit of heart,” said the author Naomi Alderman, who is also reviewing the film. “That’s partly to do with the characters: Captain Haddock is a caricature, Thomson and Thompson are comedy figures. I did sigh a bit when I saw there were only two females, and they have five lines between them – but that’s the fault of the source material.”
Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Jouret, a former manager of the Tintin estate, said this week: “There’s a risk that Spielberg’s vision will undermine Hergé’s.”
Such vitriol grates with the warmth normally reserved for Hergé, who was born as George Remi in 1907. He began publishing Tintin’s adventures in a Brussels newspaper in 1929, and the strips were an instant hit. By the peak of his fame, his work had been translated into 60 languages.
He published 24 books in total, ending with Tintin and Alph-Art, half-completed when he died in 1983. It was around this time that Spielberg, who’d heard reviewers compare his 1983 film Raiders of the Lost Ark to the work of the Belgian author, rang him up.
“He just committed, at that moment, that he wanted me to be the director to turn his stories into films,” said the director, although Hergé’s biographers intimated that the process had been somewhat more fraught with legalities.
You can see why Spielberg would have been instantly attracted to the universality of Hergé’s world. “His work is very loveable. Once you discover it you become very attached,” said Michael Farr, author of Tintin: The Complete Companion. Apart from Tintin’s determination to solve puzzles, he has few other defining characteristics, and his facial features are barely more than three lines and two dots. Often working from photographs for his detailed backgrounds, Hergé’s influential drawing style was even given its own name: “ligne claire”, or clear line.
Nick Rodwell, head of Moulinsart, the company that controls the image and rights to all Tintin merchandise, said: “If this movie brings people back to the books so much the better.”
Previous Tintin adaptations have enjoyed success: the 1991 animated TV series The Adventures of Tintin aired in at least 17 countries, Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, a theatrical adaptation staged at London’s Young Vic, played to sell-out audiences, and the movie franchise will roll on. Second and third films are in the pipeline. “Hopefully I will be Tintin for a while,” said Bell. “If audiences really embrace it, I will be doing it for the rest of my life. I could be 45 and still be doing it.” – The Independent